My Four Cigarettes

I sometimes wonder if I'm the weird one (I often think it is the world). I don't want more "stuff", I don't have time to enjoy what I have to the fullest or even at all in some cases. I continue full time with my job because I have shed loads to get done and I want to do it and it is enjoyable. The money comes in, I bank it. I struggle to justify buying new things. I would rather fix things than buy new ones...

I question if I am weird because the everyone around me is so different. I walk though London and I see people spending their money on things they don't need. Stuff I would never buy. Same most places else.

I keep thinking of that film "They Live"

 

Well quite. I'll remember the books are here... I'm doing a stage of my life where books are not getting a big look in - which is a shame but I can't do everything. I feel another story about repairing things coming on...

 

I sometimes ponder what people will think when they think of all the people who died before we cured dying. The idea of not existing will seem so alien to them. Will they wonder about the potential of all those people who died, what they might have accomplished if only they had been born later. I've found as I get older, I am more fascinated by the past, especially machines and mechanics.

 

Statistics is the most ruthless law of the universe. If you eliminated your chance of dying from natural causes, all you'd accomplish was raising your chance of dying from unnatural causes to 100%. You just don't know when it's gonna happen and will spend your time waiting for it. So you'll have the trauma of the future as well as any past mental trauma staying with you forever. Unless or until consciousness can re-frame itself, we are not cut out for this. Science is just about beginning to tackle what that is at all, consciousness. We haven't even scratched the surface.

Edit: Many years ago, long before the tacky movie, I much enjoyed reading Philip Jose Farmer's 'Riverworld' series.

 

I'm not really sure if I should comment in here... the four cigarettes thread feels a bit like Jamira's Diary. Keeping this in mind, I feel the odd comment is fine but a multipost discussion might be a bit disrespectful?

This said, at the risk of doing so (feel free to kick my ass Jamira) the living forever thing, yes indeed but don't worry, I get that it is a fantastical idea and so against the grain of how we view life and the world today that most would shrug it off. Indeed as I get into my 30's I already feel I struggle to remember things. I have to think hard (spare head 3 moments if you have ever seen Red Dwarf) or find paths to the thing I need to recall. I was rather fascinated by a bit in Green Mars where they talk of not being able to remember university days or it is so dim it is like something they read or saw on television. I can see how that would happen now. My Dad is in his 70s but has a fantastic recollection of different bits of his life, my mum rarely tells these stories and I am not sure if it is because she can't remember, is private or has nothing of interest to share. So people likely remember stuff better or worse than each other. I feel a bit like I have "brain fill" like it is one thing in, one thing out and everything else goes into deep storage and I have to send the boy on an errant to go fetch it when needed.

So yes I'm decaying matter and even if say cancer and all sorts could be fixed my noggin would still be running into full up mode. Fundamentally it is the ageing that needs to be sorted. No one would want to live in a decrepid old state forever I quite agree. I write of a world where people can be resurrected when they die presumably from a digital copy by the looks of things in Entropia. My avatar stays 24 then.

But even if youth and vitality could be perpetuated, what of the mind? When I think of how long humans have been banging around really in the grand scheme of things it was but a moment ago that humans were not making it much past their 30s. Within no time really we have doubled and soon trippled that lifespan - are our brains cut out for it? This hasn't been a gradual adaption over millennia, it's been closer to the blink of an eye.

So yes, maybe cyborgs indeed, maybe we need to transfer ourselves to a digital form at which point we get into a world of interesting scifi like ghost in the shell, down and out in the magical kingdom or lain and so forth. As for if this is possible, I don't think we can tell yet, in the same way that we couldn't predict iphones before Alan Turing came along. Certainly for now, it is not - much like interstellar travel. We can't do it unless there is something pretty exciting we haven't figured out yet. We know there is a lot we still don't know, so the jury is still out on that one.

Wistrel

 

Sentient machines. Cyborgs are merely augmented biological bodies with the same fundamental issues. We'll need to work on this from the other side, we just don't understand the principles of consciousness and can't even imagine how it works yet.

There is the excellent seminal book "Understanding Understanding" by Heinz von Foerster. Unfortunately the paywall is very steep and the legal owner tight on getting unpaid copies deleted. It should be available from a university library if you have access to one. Then there is the groundbreaking collaboration of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, and on a different track Dean Radin who has created experiments whose outcomes will shake the core of your belief system. Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ are names to look for, too. Yet another, Thomas W. Campbell has developed a voluminous but interesting looking theory ("My Big TOE" [Theory Of Everything]), though I haven't managed to read more than a synopsis of it yet.

(I also try to be respectful and not derail the diary format. The occasional interjection is supposed to be motivating, telling the writer that it's actually interesting and he doesn't produce for /dev/null. Or offer additional material.)

 

We have access to some stuff by Foerster but not that one alas (either that or our proxy is acting up with springer - entirely possible). "Dean Radin who has created experiments whose outcomes will shake the core of your belief system" - go on then?

 

Not sure how to do that without hijacking the thread, thought I just throw some names out to search for and see what resonates. Created a new thread here:

http://www.entropiaplanets.com/threads/the-nature-of-consciousness.21609/

 

Interesting thoughts on the crashing of the systems (then the car!). Have to admit I hadn't really thought of it. I guess when it comes to "safety critical systems" I s'pose I figured that one had been licked a dozen times before. Planes are more or less automatic as I understand it (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) and then there are automatic trains in some places. Automatic landers on mars. so on and so forth. I don't know exactly what they do to ensure nothing goes wrong (or have ways to mitigate when it does) but they do it. I heard a rumour once that all NASA code is written in assembler! :O

But on the cars and automation in general I'm all for it. I'm one of those evil people who wants to put all the truck and railway drivers out of a job and hang the consequences for society and employment. Actually I want to get rid of humans doing anything that can reasonably be automated.

That said, I was surprised when I watched a recent Tesla video of a car driving itself and felt very unnerved by it. I think in the end it came down to 2 things oddly. One was I think mainly my being freaked by left hand drive. The other was that the steering wheel was moving by itself. I think if there wasn't a steering while I'd have been ok with it. Another part of me worries about how good the vision system is as I tend to not put a lot of trust in conventional computer vision and find myself perpetually confused when it occasionally actually works! I tend to think the only way we can do vision/intelligence "as we know it" would be brain like processors or neural nets.

That said, I was watching a TED video from last month this morning with Elon Musk in and he was saying they are about to reveal an automated truck that runs entirely off vision and uses neural nets. Crazy times!

Incidentally, I did some calculation a little while ago about if we could make a chip that works like a brain and has similar levels of complexity (although interestingly an artificial brain might be more efficient so may not need to be as complex for the same ability). I forget the numbers off hand but I worked out we could maybe do it in a while and in a while more make it chip scale. If I remember right though 1, or it may have even been both of those stages was going to be problematic because we can't shrink the processors small enough in theory. So terminator style "chip in the head" AI might not actually be possible unless we invent a new way of making ICs.

I should go listen to the rest of what Mr Musk has to say really...

Wistrel

 

You know... I used to think that sort of thing was crazy talk... but (and I just took a moment to double check latest my occasional pass time again and was not let down https://www.google.co.uk/search?gs_ivs=1&q=how+old+is+Theresa+May#q=who+is+she+married+to&tts=0 This was me talking to my computer asking first "How old is Theresa May" then "who is she married to" It even told me the answers via a good voice in a perfectly well formed sentence. Google does not disappoint) these days it doesn't seem like such a stretch at all to go from say giving me directions (https://www.google.co.uk/search?gs_...irections+from+Nottingham+to+Winchester&tts=0 again, a perfectly formed audible reply casually telling me about the route) to manipulating a 3d scene.

After all, the scene components can be, and in fact are, described (https://www.google.co.uk/search?gs_ivs=1&q=show+me+a+3D+picture+of+a+kettle#tts=0 Google replied "Here you go, some pictures"). Need a cracked wall? "Check out these pictures of a cracked wall" says google (https://www.google.co.uk/search?gs_ivs=1&q=show+me+a+picture+of+a+cracked+wall#tts=0). Once this basic functionality of being able to reply in a natural way and and parse the sentence has been cracked (and it seems it has) it is just a case of hooking the instructions up to the object manipulation task.

OK so the artistic component is a long way off but the raw "fetch and display and move about" could happen as soon as someone wants to program it. We really are living in the future... (or getting damn close to it anyhow).

Wistrel

PS I still love that picture!

 

The reason is, the piece of language that gets transmitted between humans does not contain all the information needed to decipher it. Not even if you program a receiver with a well-defined grammar, extensive vocabulary, fuzzy logic to deal with inaccuracies, or whatever, will it be enough to understand it. An entire human life with its experiences, knowledge, and intuitions functions as a resonance body for the received message. Understanding then is filtered out of this resonance. Computers cannot replicate this (yet). We don't even have a working theoretical model for it, hence the reference to consciousness as a phenomenon to study.